Alzheimer's an irreversible, progressive brain disease affects 5.1 million Americans. Alzheimer's patients experience a gradual decline in memory and thinking that can make it difficult for them to complete familiar tasks. To overcome this challenge, a reminder device, which can be programmed remotely by a caregiver, could prompt those with Alzheimer's with timely notifications. Likewise, autism affects 1 in 68 children in the US, and about 1% of the world's population has autism. By using a reminder device, a broad spectrum of autism patients can be assisted through the aforementioned technology.
It has been shown that autistic students respond to commands better when they are announced in the same tone of voice. As a result, instead of using live prompting, which contains voice inflections, students who utilize our device will be able to depend on a more tone-regulated notification system. Not only will the technology of this invention diminish the time and energy spent by instructors to relay repeated information to their students, but it will also elicit a better response from its constituents.
Although reminder devices exist in the market, the ability to customize such devices is limited. Most clock applications can be set to specific times to provide reminders; however, these reminders mostly come in the form of buzzers or non-customizable, non-verbal commands. For clocks that have a voice-controlled reminder feature, most are expensive and have limited customizability. There are software applications available on mobile devices that provide a reminder functionality; however, the high cost of the mobile device or the inability to use a mobile device makes these applications inaccessible to many categories of individuals including e.g. the autistic, blind, and elderly.
For setting calendar-based alarms, existing reminder devices either use displays or use speech recognition software. Display-based devices can be touchscreen or keypad based. The problem with these devices is that they need to be large so that the user can read the screen or use the keypad with ease. In addition, these devices are not suitable for people who are blind or visually impaired. Furthermore, the display itself can have significant power consumption.
Other types of reminder devices use speech recognition for extracting the time and contextual information from the commands. Speech recognition requires a large amount of memory and computational power, which increases the size and power consumption of the device. In addition, noisy environments may make it difficult to perform recognize commands accurately.
The present invention advances the art by providing a reminder device using gestures without the use of displays, keypads or speech recognition software, therewith significantly reducing size, storage requirements and power consumption.